2009-03-13

Migratory Season

Hello. I've migrated across the world to New Zealand in the last month. I've seen quite a few sites and sights.

I'm now well situated and will hopefully resume employment shortly. Unemployment is nice in that I finally have time to accomplish the myriad goals that accumulate throughout my days. It's bad in that money only goes out and it has a finite supply.

For instance, I now have a workable version of Icarus, a command-line PicasaWeb uploader that I used to upload photos quickly from Nautilus (using Nautilus actions). It's been an important exercise in programming in Vala. I really hope that its bindings get well documented at some point.

I also have improved the oft rewritten GenderGuesser. The current incarnation is written in C with GLib and GTK+. It now also makes good use of GIO and LibXML. I originally disliked the LibXML API. At least, the help files that ship with it are a mess and not easy to follow. I suppose Vala and LibXML both make me miss the wonderful documentation the Java API has.

I've been walking up quite a few hills out here with my girlfriend. There's lots of good exercise to be had. I've also found an ideal electronics store nearby. I was afraid one didn't exist. I'm trying to make a better effort at letting technology make me more, rather than less, productive. I've reorganised my Google Reading habits. I've also removed from the list one of the most prolific feeds: TreeHugger. Its propaganda quotient was also getting a bit high. Slashdot's sensationalist rating is as high as ever, but I'm a pretty good filter, and I'm not aware of an adequate substitute for my needs.

I'm also using an application called Almanah Diary on GNOME for logging my thoughts and activities. I do too much to post it all here on my public blog. I also like keeping data local.

I've been paying Google for additional web space in PicasaWeb for a while now. However, I hadn't gotten around to uploading much because

there isn't an uploading solution that I'm aware of that fits my needs (surprisingly)

there isn't per image privacy settings

Icarus solves the first problem, but the second requires Google. Often, I will have a set of photos, and 90% of them I feel comfortable making public. Sadly, it's all or nothing with PicasaWeb it seems. Temporary solutions that I've explored include:

Making two separate albums, one with both the public and private photos, which I keep private, and a second with just the public photos, which I make public. This sucks, because I end up duplicating that 90% of public photos.

Make two separate albums, one with just the private photos and one with just the public photos. This sucks, because then the private photos are out of context from the public ones.

That reminds me, sometimes context can be difficult to retain because I've had issues trying to sort by both name and date, where date didn't seem to use the EXIF date but rather the files modified date, or something weird. The names were an issue because they weren't named in any particular order.

I like PicasaWeb so much, but there are all these "small" things that prevent me from really embracing it. At least it's much more compatible with my needs than, say, Flickr or facebook.